Multimodal affective interaction: a comment on musical origins

THE RIGORS OF ESTABLISHING INNATENESS and domain specificity pose challenges to adaptationist models of music evolution. In articulating a series of constraints, the authors of the target articles provide strategies for investigating the potential origins of music. We propose additional approaches for exploring theories based on exaptation. We discuss a view of music as a multimodal system of engaging with affect, enabled by capacities of symbolism and a theory of mind.

Play it again: did this melody occur more frequently or was it heard more recently? The role of stimulus familiarity in episodic recognition of music

Episodic recognition of novel and familiar melodies was examined by asking participants to make judgments about the recency and frequency of presentation of melodies over the course of two days of testing. For novel melodies, recency judgments were poor and participants often confused the number of presentations of a melody with its day of presentation; melodies heard frequently were judged as have been heard more recently than they actually were. For familiar melodies, recency judgments were much more accurate and the number of presentations of a melody helped rather than hindered performance. Frequency judgments were generally more accurate than recency judgments and did not demonstrate the same interaction with musical familiarity. Overall, these findings suggest that (1) episodic recognition of novel melodies is based more on a generalized feeling of familiarity than on a specific episodic memory, (2) frequency information contributes more strongly to this generalized memory than recency information, and (3) the formation of an episodic memory for a melody depends either on the overall familiarity of the stimulus or the availability of a verbal label. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Dynamic response: Real-time adaptation for music emotion

Music plays an enormous role in today's computer games; it serves to elicit emotion, generate interest and convey important information. Traditional gaming music is fixed at the event level, where tracks loop until a state change is triggered. This behaviour however does not reflect musically the in-game state between these events. We propose a dynamic music environment, where music tracks adjust in real-time to the emotion of the in-game state. We are looking to improve the affective response to symbolic music through the modification of structural and performative characteristics through the application of rule-based techniques. In this paper we undertake a multidiscipline approach, and present a series of primary music-emotion structural rules for implementation. The validity of these rules was tested in small study involving eleven participants, each listening to six permutations from two musical works. Preliminary results indicate that the environment was generally successful in influencing the emotion of the musical works for three of the intended four directions (happier, sadder & content/dreamier). Our secondary aim of establishing that the use of music-emotion rules, sourced predominantly from Western classical music, could be applied with comparable results to modern computer gaming music was also largely successfully.